Exclusive: Apple's FaceTime coming to iPod touch, iPad, we detail how

One of our reliable Apple connections (not Jason Burford) just let us know some pretty fantastic news. It’s been widely assumed that Apple will start to roll out their FaceTime real-time communication protocol to more and more of their mobile devices (and possibly their computers), but until now, we’ve been in the dark on how this will actually work. After all, there are no phone numbers to call on an iPod touch or iPad. Here is how we have been told FaceTime will work on non-iPhone devices:

It’s actually pretty simple… Your Apple ID will be registered with your device/s, and that will allow other Apple devices to start a FaceTime call using your email address. Apple will also reportedly make use of push notifications to deliver these incoming FaceTime connection requests as we have been informed there is a push notification detector tied into the FaceTime frameworks in the new iPhone OS 4.1 beta. We’re not sure how Apple will handle an iPod touch trying to connect to a FaceTime session on an iPhone as it seems Apple would still require you to use the iPhone’s phone number, at least that’s how it seems currently. In all reality though, we’re pretty confident Apple will make a straight forward and unified way of talking to every eventual FaceTime-enabled Apple device or computer, and it might be an Apple ID, or possibly something else down the road.

Because those screenshots are so high resolution and supposedly from the new iPod touch, doesn’t this mean that the new touch will get a Retina Display as well? :]

Andrew

my guess is that you are right Sir Austin. The pixel width of that image is ~640 (639) the exact pixel width of the Retina Display. :D

Young

so when we say face-time on ipad..are we talking about the current ipad or the next generation?

Sammy

can’t be the current one. it doesn’t have a camera.

http://www.stechato.com stechato

This is a step in the right direction, but Apple will need to make a desktop FaceTime client before their new service really catches on. Out of all the possible devices, the laptop is the one most likely to be used in a wifi area…